And what about when a human driver does this? I look forward to the day when humans are banned from driving. I've been driving for 10 years and have had people smash their cars into me from so many angles it's not even funny. Got a concussion from one encounter. All of the people behind the wheel were either high or drunk. To the brain-dead idiots who say that computers will never be as good at driving as humans are (which is just a selfish excuse so they can continue to 'enjoy' the 'thrill' of driving), I say this: You should have been aborted. But it's not too late, you can still kill yourself. Oh, and self-driving cars already drive orders of magnitude better than a person who has emptied a bottle of vodka or has smoked 3 joints. Get realistic and pull your head out of your ass.

Solar sail can achieve 25% light speed, according to NASA, and Alpha Centauri is 4 light years away.

You want a manned mission (with robots doing all the actual work) to determine if the conventional wisdom that a manned mission to the outer planets is physically impossible is correct. Even if the pilot dies, you learn the furthest a manned mission can reach. There's seven billion people, you can afford to expend one or two. Ideally, they'd be volunteers and there'll be no shortage of them, but if you're concerned about valuable life, send members of the Tea Party.

> We have the technology today to get a manned mission to Alpha Centauri and back. It would take 15-20 years for the journey and the probability of survival is poor, but we could do it.

Why would you want to send a manned mission as the first mission? A robotic probe should be the first mission. 20 years for alpha centauri and back translates to about half the speed of light. I highly doubt that any current or foreseeable technology could get a probe to that speed. Not even fusion-powered rockets could, and we don't have them. A fission-powered rocket might realistically be able get up to 0.5% c (1500 km/s), in which case it would take a millenium and a half to complete the mission. Some more intelligent proposals like huge orbital linear accelerators might accelerate a tiny robotic probe to 10% the speed of light but even then you're looking at a 90 year journey.

Your scenario sounds insanely over-optimistic, to put it mildly.

No big surprise. The military are willing to invest what it takes for what they need. Military entities are, by necessity, pitifully naive when it comes to anything useful, but once they specify what they think they want, they don't shirk at the cost, they get the job done. A pointless job, perhaps, but nonetheless a completed job.

The corporate sector wants money. Things don't ever have to get done, the interest on monies paid is good enough and there hasn't been meaningful competition in living memory. Because one size never fits all, it's not clear competition is even what you want. Economic theory says it isn't.

The only other sector, as I have said many times before, that is remotely in the space race is the hobbyist/open source community. In other words, the background behind virtually all the X-Prize contestants, the background behind the modern waverider era, the background that the next generation of space enthusiasts will come from (Kerbel Space Program and Elite: Dangerous will have a similar effect on the next generation of scientists and engineers as Star Trek the old series and Doctor Who did in the 1960s, except this time it's hands-on).

I never thought the private sector would do bugger all, it's not in their blood. They're incapable of innovation on this kind of scale. It's not clear they're capable of innovation at all, all the major progress is bought or stolen from researchers and inventors.

No, with civilian government essentially walking away, there's only two players in the field and whilst the hobbyists might be able to crowdsource a launch technology, it'll be a long time before they get to space themselves. The military won't get there at all, nobody to fight, so the hobbyists will still be first with manned space missions, but it's going to take 40-50 years at best.

We have the technology today to get a manned mission to Alpha Centauri and back. It would take 15-20 years for the journey and the probability of survival is poor, but we could do it. By my calculations, it would take 12 years to build the components and assemble them in space. Only a little longer than it took for America to get the means to go to the moon and back. We could actually have hand-held camera photos taken in another solar system and chunks of rocky debris from the asteroid belt there back on Earth before Mars One launches its first rocket AND before crowdfunded space missions break the atmosphere.

All it takes is putting personal egos and right wing politics on the shelf, locking the cupboard and then lowering it into an abandoned mineshaft, which should then be sealed with concrete.

Example: In 2006, the Fijian military seized power from the elected Parliament. Some time afterward, on instruction from the military dictator, the President abrogated the constitution. During the entire tenure of the military regime, they did not issue a single law. They lacked the constitutional authority to do so. Instead, they issued a number of decrees, because that's what they were: Follow this instruction or get a visit from some very burly men with guns.

During the time between the abrogation of the old constitution and the promulgation of the new one (a period of several years), Fiji was a non-constitutional republic.

That's actually what it's like at "Mojave Spaceport". Hangers of small aviation practicioners and their junk. Gary Hudson, Burt Rutan, etc. Old aircraft and parts strewn about. Left-over facilities from Rotary Rocket used by flight schools. A medium-sized facility for Orbital. Some big facilities for BAE, etc. An aircraft graveyard next door.

SS2 has not completed testing and it is probable that there will be a need for redesign of one or more components. So, this is a really bad time to have the hand-off. Publicity isn't a good reason.

>Turning water into wine? Bootlegging; producing alcohol without a license or paying taxes on it.

And not charging for it. Clearly anti-capitalist.

>Healing the sick? Practicing medicine without a license, and violating FDA rules.
Also didn't charge or demand medical insurance - clearly an Obamacare socialist !

>Feeding a crowd with just two fish? McDonald's and Burger King would sue him, and demand an FDA inquiry into his kitchen methods.

Feeding the hungry sounds an awful lot like foodstamps to me.

Basically, as Bill Maher pointed out, Jesus couldn't get elected in the Jesus party !

But that's not the only form democracy could take. There are several versions where the number of votes a person has on a given law gets increased the more he or she will be personally affected BY that law.

So even if you get 90% of the people to vote that all gays should be put to death on a funeral pyre the law STILL wouldn't pass because the 10% voting against it would include the gay people and because they are only ones affected, and the way they are affected is so extreme - they would easily still get 60% of the total vote.

Democracy doesn't have to mean tyranny of the majority - there are many ways to avoid that. Many types of checks and balances one could imagine and many of those have been tried. The Republic is just one possibility out of quite a large list, and it probably isn't the best (or even a particularly good) example from it.

Looking at the history of the planet, what we have is basically lots and lots of mass extinctions - every major branch of life reaching it's peak and then being almost entirely eradicated and life basically starting over (and by the way - this happening to the human race is not just likely but an absolute certainty - the only actual defence is off-planet colonies which we don't yet have).

There are different ways you can interpret this data however. One interpretation is that life is extremely rare, that we came so close to it ending forever so many times that we must assume the odds of us being here were billions to one and that it may well never have happened anywhere else - that even if life had gotten started elsewhere, it probably didn't survive into present day.

The other, equally valid, interpretation of the same data is that life is extremely resilient - that it has survived absolutely everything the universe has (quite literally) thrown at it. Species and even entire families aren't resilient but life is - even if something kills absolutely everything except a few extremophile bacteria at the bottom of some volcano somewhere -that's enough, life will re-arise and some day, something as intelligent as us will walk the earth again. By this view it's quite likely we are NOT the first, though we're probably the first to make it space. Biologists like Jack Cohen will tell you that the odds of there being a single shred of evidence we ever existed in a billion years time is as close to zero as makes no difference. Even our roads and buildings aren't as long-lasting as we imagine, they only look that way on human time-scales, not on planetary ones. The satelites will all eventually crash with nothing to replenish lost velocity. That little plaque on the moon may survive- but who knows if it will be found by whatever is next able to ask "why are we here".

There is no real way to choose between these views, they are both equally well supported by the available data and until our capacity to look is significantly improved we can't get data from enough other places to see which prediction they match. For the moment we have two predictions from the same data but until we can confirm either one we can't know.
That is why looking is important. It's also why things like THESE are important, they add data which can let us refine our predictions.

That is a critical part of the scientific process, it's helps us figure out what to be looking for in the first place. The more extreme conditions we find life in - the wider the potential search space becomes (and theoretically - the more likely we are to find *something*). It also means that searching it all takes longer.

There is no scientific answer to the question of whether life is such an unlikely event it only ever happened here, or common and happened many, many times. The data we have can equally well defend either conclusion.
So we need more data. Every bit of new data helps.

Uh... that only means they don't bother with a warrant. They just go and get whatever they like.

Perversely, you're actually better off dealing with these ridiculous, draconian, panopticonian laws, because at least in theory you have some kind of recourse - even if it consists of fighting retroactively to reduce the J. Edgar Hoovering up of your personal data. If you use an offshore email provider, the NSA will just grab whatever it wants, whenever it wants, without even the tiniest fig leaf of law to cover up strategic bits.

Considering that the doomsday didn't eventuate during the cold war then it is not necessarily wrong to say that it was closer then than now. The main difference between the danger being face now and then was that back then you didn't have a huge segment of the population disbelieving the experts who said that the world was in danger. Nobody was so stupid enough to say that just because people died before the atom bomb was invented that it means that bomb couldn't be responsible for killing anyone now (to adopt one of the anti-AGW lines).

We are actually closer to danger now because politically we are further from a solution than we were back then. At least both sides recognised that they had to consider the ramifications of their actions and that something had to be done. Fast forward to today, and the two sides now want different things; one wants to change things while the other wants to keep the status quo. That is far more dangerous than what we had in the past.

The other crucial difference is that for the danger of doomsday to exist back then, someone would have to make the decision to "push the button". Someone would have to decide to be actively responsible for armageddon. The danger we face now is opposite. If we don't take action this time then the predicted doomsday will happen by itself. Nobody has to press any button to make bad things happen. We are closer to doomsday because the button was already pressed years ago when we started down the path of rapid expansion of our use of fossil fuels.

The fact is that the doomsday clock actually worked during the cold war. It kept the issue in the minds of the people, so that the political will was there to solve the problem. The clock wasn't accurate nor inaccurate. It was a symbol.

In the same way, the changing of the clock isn't striving for accuracy in as much as it is raising the notion that we are facing a crisis in the public perception. And it is needed now more than ever.

No, we were not told that. Your assertion is simply a lie. Global warming happens over a much longer time period than this. There is not one single climatologist who would make such an absurd statement as to predict disaster within 4 years.

There is no reason that we have to pick one and abandon work on the others. I don't see that the same resources go into solving more than one, except that the meteor and volcano problem have one solution in common - be on another planet when it happens.

The clathrate problem and nuclear war have the potential to end the human race while it is still on one planet, so we need to solve both of them ASAP.

Are there any valuable functions mapped to a middle button anyway, that make it so important?

Yes. For people who use real computers, middle button = "paste selected text".

Who puts three fingers on the surface of a mouse?

People who use real computers but have not yet found the one true pointing device, the 4-button Logitech Marble Mouse Trackball.